Jiahong Yan
Publications
Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoning
In-context learning (ICL) allows large models to adapt to tasks using a few examples, yet its extension to vision-language models (VLMs) remains fragile. Our analysis reveals that the fundamental limitation lies in an inductive gap, models often produce correct answers from flawed reasoning, while struggling to extract consistent rules across demonstrations. This gap is further exacerbated by two visual-level obstacles: an overwhelming proportion of redundant visual tokens that obscure textual cues, and a skewed attention distribution that favors the initial image at the expense of subsequent context. To address these issues, we introduce a framework that restructures multimodal ICL as a principled inductive-deductive process. The framework incorporates a similarity-based visual token compression module to filter out redundant patches, a dynamic attention rebalancing mechanism to distribute focus equitably across all images, and a chain-of-thought paradigm that explicitly guides the model to analyze individual examples, derive a generalizable rule, and then apply it to the query. An auxiliary learning pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards to reinforce faithful citation and noise filtering. Evaluations across eight benchmarks covering visual perception, logical reasoning, STEM problems, and sarcasm detection demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over standard ICL baselines for multiple open-source VLMs, highlighting the potential of equipping models with genuine inductive capabilities in multimodal settings.
Concise Geometric Description as a Bridge: Unleashing the Potential of LLM for Plane Geometry Problem Solving
Plane Geometry Problem Solving (PGPS) is a multimodal reasoning task that aims to solve a plane geometric problem based on a geometric diagram and problem textual descriptions. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess strong reasoning skills, their direct application to PGPS is hindered by their inability to process visual diagrams. Existing works typically fine-tune Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) end-to-end on large-scale PGPS data to enhance visual understanding and reasoning simultaneously. However, such joint optimization may compromise base LLMs' inherent reasoning capability. In this work, we observe that LLM itself is potentially a powerful PGPS solver when appropriately formulating visual information as textual descriptions. We propose to train a MLLM Interpreter to generate geometric descriptions for the visual diagram, and an off-the-shelf LLM is utilized to perform reasoning. Specifically, we choose Conditional Declaration Language (CDL) as the geometric description as its conciseness eases the MLLM Interpreter training. The MLLM Interpreter is fine-tuned via CoT (Chain-of-Thought)-augmented SFT followed by GRPO to generate CDL. Instead of using a conventional solution-based reward that compares the reasoning result with the ground-truth answer, we design CDL matching rewards to facilitate more effective GRPO training, which provides more direct and denser guidance for CDL generation. To support training, we construct a new dataset, Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, by manually reviewing Formalgeo7k v2 and incorporating CoT annotations. Extensive experiments on Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, Unigeo, and MathVista show our method (finetuned on only 5.5k data) performs favorably against leading open-source and closed-source MLLMs.
Concise Geometric Description as a Bridge: Unleashing the Potential of LLM for Plane Geometry Problem Solving
Plane Geometry Problem Solving (PGPS) is a multimodal reasoning task that aims to solve a plane geometric problem based on a geometric diagram and problem textual descriptions. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess strong reasoning skills, their direct application to PGPS is hindered by their inability to process visual diagrams. Existing works typically fine-tune Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) end-to-end on large-scale PGPS data to enhance visual understanding and reasoning simultaneously. However, such joint optimization may compromise base LLMs' inherent reasoning capability. In this work, we observe that LLM itself is potentially a powerful PGPS solver when appropriately formulating visual information as textual descriptions. We propose to train a MLLM Interpreter to generate geometric descriptions for the visual diagram, and an off-the-shelf LLM is utilized to perform reasoning. Specifically, we choose Conditional Declaration Language (CDL) as the geometric description as its conciseness eases the MLLM Interpreter training. The MLLM Interpreter is fine-tuned via CoT (Chain-of-Thought)-augmented SFT followed by GRPO to generate CDL. Instead of using a conventional solution-based reward that compares the reasoning result with the ground-truth answer, we design CDL matching rewards to facilitate more effective GRPO training, which provides more direct and denser guidance for CDL generation. To support training, we construct a new dataset, Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, by manually reviewing Formalgeo7k v2 and incorporating CoT annotations. Extensive experiments on Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, Unigeo, and MathVista show our method (finetuned on only 5.5k data) performs favorably against leading open-source and closed-source MLLMs.